More Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog

[Trigger warning: profanity, slurs, incest, rape jokes, racism, and other unfiltered access to the consciousness of the Internet]

The Anti-Reactionary FAQ is by far the most popular entry on this blog, with a total of 28,000 page views. Many of those views came from links by bloggers and news outlets, but others came from random netizens who stumbled across it during Google searches. WordPress records the terms they used to get there, which gives us a little insight into their minds.

Were these searchers liberals looking for help debating Reactionaries? Were they Reactionaries dutifully searching for counterarguments against their ideas? Curious political science students lured in by the wide-ranging discussion of social trends?

Actually, they were none of these things. They were porn viewers who wanted videos of people fucking aunts, who had misspelled “aunty” as “anti” and misspelled “fuck” as “faq”.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on until finally, like an old-timey archaeologist decoding Linear B inscriptions, I realized that the word “ankal” (or sometimes “ancal”) appeared beside “anti” in a disproportionate number of these phrases and so they were probably talking about aunts and uncles. Then I noticed a lot of them mentioned Indians or Pakistanis, and found from Urban Dictionary that in Indian culture, “aunty” is a general term for a middle-aged woman. So I think in Indian/Pakistani porn, “aunty” is their equivalent of “milf”.

I’d previously read several accusations that Pakistan, despite its austere women-in-burkas-at-all-times image, leads the world in most pornographic searches. While not actively disbelieving the data, I felt like a lot of this was media outlets being too quick to play up the man-bites-dog-esque “very Islamic purity culture is actually obsessed with porn!” angle. But after monitoring how many pornographic searches my blog gets from Pakistan, I no longer doubt.

(anyway, now the man-bites-dog segment of the media has moved on to the story that very Islamic purity culture Pakistan also leads the world in searches for gay porn)

A while back we conducted a little experiment to see if blog readers knew how the average person thought. Athrelon won and attributed his success to his work as a medical student, where he got to see a broad cross-section of the population instead of the People Like Us In Our Little Bubble whom the rest of us interact with.

If you can’t get into medical school, looking at Google search terms seems like your next-best option. It’s a good way of reminding yourself that most people in the world are neither liberals nor conservatives, but just people looking for some hot aunty porn. So without further ado, here is the second installment of Slate Star Codex’s quasi-annual feature, Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog.

Search Terms About Being In Love With Your Sister

I made one little post about the phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction, and now I am cursed with a never-ending stream of Google searchers who want my advice about incest.

I already mentioned last year how I got queries like: “siblings attracted to each other”, “my sis is so pretty”, “sweet sister so pretty”, “sister can you not so pretty”, and the scientifically intriguing “are attractive siblings more prone to incest”.

In the last eight months, I can add to that collection: “attract with sister”, “how to attract sister”, “how to attract my sister”, and “how to atract sisters”, which is my favorite both for the spelling error and for the implication that he just wants sisters in general, not necessarily his sister – any girl with a living sibling is good enough for him.

But there’s also “my sister is pretty”, “is my sister prettier”, and “my sister is so much prettier” (hey, man, it’s not a contest). Others are more interrogative, asking “why my sister pretty”, “why i am sexualy attrect our sister”, and the very philosophical “why is my sister”.

Also, one person who got here with “are people attracted to siblings”. I would say that the above answers the question pretty thoroughly, except for one thing – I haven’t gotten anyone claiming to be attracted to their brother. I don’t know if this is just because the original post used the example of sisters (the exact title was “If Opposites Attract, Why Is My Sister So Pretty?”) or because brothers find sisters attractive but not vice versa. So, for science, I’m going to type the following phrase and let Google crawl it and see what happens:

IF OPPOSITES ATTRACT, WHY IS MY BROTHER SO PRETTY?

There. Anyhow, not everybody was asking Google about how much they loved their sisters. I also got “why is my sister a bitch”

Search Terms About Not Being Entirely On Board With Polyamory

I wrote an essay about my experiences with polyamory, and in the comments Spandrell of Bloody Shovel responded with a theory that only ugly people were able to remain polyamorous successfully. In one of my most memorable experiences as a blogger, a commenter then responded with a picture of his fashion model girlfriend, leading Spandrell to admit that “That’s a big piece of……data.”

Anyway, Spandrell’s opinion seems pretty widely shared, since that post has then gone on to get search terms like: “polyamorists are ugly”, “polyamory people are ugly”, “why are polyamorists gross and nerdy”, “why are polyamorous people ugly”, “are all polyamorous people ugly”.

But other Google searchers have entirely different reasons for hating polyamory! Like “polyamory aspies” or “poly or just a whore”.

And finally, some people just keep it simple: “i hate poly people”.

Search Terms That Imply A Heartbreaking Story

“if a woman pleads insanity can she have her kids back”

“can i sue the hospital for oversedating my husband with pain medication and causing his death”

“my grandfather’s leg is starting to rot will he die?”

“is it possible for someone with vascular dementia to be upset with you, yell at you, and then start to be distant?”

“my hearts aches when i think of my mistakes”

“can you condition yourseld to like sex”

“id didn’t match for residency but it turned out good”

“wat can i do to die slowly”

“what happenes to those whoreare addicted to sucking things”

Search Terms By Time Travelers

You may have heard about Nemiroff and Wilson (2013), the study where scientists at Michigan Tech did an automated examination of all search queries looking for things that were searched or discussed before people could possibly have known about them (ie Comet ISON before it was discovered; Pope Francis before he was elected) in order to catch time travelers. Alas, they didn’t find anything suspicious.

On the other hand, someone got to my blog by the search term “survive march 4 2014”, which until I read that query was not something I was worrying about.

Less scary but still time-bending: “scott alexander gets married”. I can just see someone getting increasingly exasperated that my wedding photos aren’t online yet and then slapping their forehead when they remember they have to wait until August 2017.

Time travelers from the past would theoretically be harder to detect, but some of them aren’t even trying: “trial of king leopold ii of belgium next week”.

People Who Typed A Political Manifesto Into Google For Some Reason

“pity the people who idealize the dictators in pakistan”

“sexuality is learned and reinforced like all behaviour. eg. baby rapist are born raping babies, they learn their sexual orientation from by being raped or abused as infants”

“hire a competent white person to do the work of a few minorities that cannot do the job”

“isn’t using birth control better than having unwanted teen pregnancies and abortion?”

“the rothchilds are not good enough to feed to swine may thay fester burn rot and stnk of decay in a sewer in hell full of excreament”

I think we all have our days when we enter long screeds against the Rothschilds into Google search boxes, but some of us are definitely more creative than others.

Search Terms Obviously By Students Trying To Cheat On Their Homework

“some people were trapped during world war ii. one man used elephants to get them to safety. many people feel that the true heroes of a war are those fighting. what do you think?”

“write a story how you and your friend fell out. alternatively you can write about someone else’s quarrel. which of the friends was right / wrong?”

“demonstrate how federal laws are impacted by the times, political influences and even changes in social norms?”

“evaluate shelley’s philosoophy in adonais”

“explain using your own words forms of government under adolf hitler of germany and louis xiv in france” (I like the thought process here: “Hm, it says explain using my own words. Better include that in the search query to make sure I only get pages that are written in my own words.”)

“if you have something white point 075 pounds how many pounds is that be” (I don’t understand this question at all)

“imagine yourself as an aztec nobleman, describe to me your way of life and that of your family,court,slaves,finances,etc?”

“what are the status of feudal monarchies, specifically the actions of king henry iv and the intended and unintended consequences of those actions”

But as always, the granddaddy of the Students Trying To Cheat On Homework Questions is the alien question. I have spun that off into its own post to avoid attracting seventh-graders here and making them read about antis with masive nippals.

People Interested In Albino Black People

This is second only to the alien question people in terms of “I mention how weird it is that something gets so many search hits, and now all those search hits come to me”. On a post about using Google Correlate to play with data, I checked to see what search term was most disproportionately entered by white people – that is, what search term was most likely to be entered by a white person as opposed to a person of color – and the answer was “black albino”.

Well, after that, the readership of Slate Star Codex got just a little bit more white.

But the number one most popular commenter? “deiseach”, with 19 searches.

People Searching For Information About Rape Culture

As you may remember, I wrote a post detailing my problems with this term. And surprise surprise, even though I can’t get people to learn about statistics or medicine or transhumanism or anything interesting even if I drag them kicking and screaming, the level of fascination with rape culture remains at an all time high. We have “rape culture”, “is there really rape culture”, “what would women do different rape culture”, “rape culture philosophy”, and “bloody rape culture”, which I like to think of as being entered by an exasperated British feminist.

Others seem to lack a certain understanding that rape culture is a problem, like “why is rape culture bad” and “arguments for rape culture”.

Others are less scrutable, like “stars rape culture”. I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone noticed that that astronomical bodies are totally failing to speak out against the patriarchy and so are clearly misogynist. There’s also “modalrape dot com”, which is either a misspelling of “model rape” or else is referring to rape which necessarily occurs in all possible worlds. I hope some of the feminists in philosophy are doing something about this.

“inefficient person” (darnit Google, just because I keep writing blog posts instead of doing work doesn’t mean you have to direct this search to me!)

“who is the best pun star in the world” (this, on the other hand, you can direct to my blog any time)

“dyspeptic ploughman” (I like picturing the Google ads for this query: “Top site on dyspeptic ploughman!” “Your source for dyspeptic ploughman!” “Buy dyspeptic ploughman now!” Actually, that works for all of these.)

“can beating yourself up help with conditioning” (Eliezer, someone has just proven you right)

I once wrote a post on my blog about that bestiality and incest are not victimless, and yeah we got numerous people looking for incest/bestiality. Till now the most idiotic search term for that post was “atheists endorse incest and beastiality” (atheists weren’t mentioned in the post anyway). Also we did once a post about the regulation of prosititution, and until the day of today, we got people searching for “Utrecht brothel”.

In the interest of avoiding confirmation bias, here are the search terms I get, which are not even slightly strange. Every one of my google search terms seems like my blog might have something to offer them, although a couple of these are interested in a post I haven’t written yet but plan to write. This is everything, except for straightforward searches for the exact URL of one of my posts, which I dropped so as not to basically spam your blog.

I don’t think I can get at stats for Theden, but my WordPress search term stats are pretty reasonable — though often in somewhat odd ways. The second-highest search term is ‘anonymous’, because I once wrote a post calling them not as unconventional as they think they are. The third is ‘nelson mandela terrorist’ (and most of the top twenty or so are variations on that theme), and the fourth is ‘hipsterism’. Also, a lot of people can’t spell my username.

But then there’s the long tail. A lot of those are also reasonable — ‘”all voice, no exit”‘, ‘anarcho fascism’, ‘fascism and tyler durden’, ‘moldbug maistre’, and ‘lena dunham immoral’ all led to my WordPress once, as did ‘site:.nydwracu.wordpress.com scott alexander’ — but then there’s ‘maest police w’, ‘sexo tyrany 9 taxi’, an entire poem that I cited as evidence of something bad the details of which I can’t remember now, ‘things to use when fucking’, ‘menfakin horse’ (?!), ‘nelson mandela is the wizard?’, ‘why can’t xavier convert the brahmin?’, ‘the aim of progressivism is to avoid the over reliance to textbooks’ (no, it really isn’t), ‘girls maest horses’ (I have *no idea* what this means, but ‘mäest’ means “оff of the mountain” in Ingrian and some dialects of Finnish), ‘+ashtiaq ahmed murderer’, ‘psychological analysis of a juggalo’, ‘brahmin men can’t fuck’, ‘””the article hummus, along with other articles relating to the arab–israeli conflict, is currently subject to active arbitration remedies.’, ‘Америка последняя империя Усама’, ‘blitzkrieg horse’, a very persistent searcher trying to figure out which was the last empire to fall (come to think of it, what would that be? the British one? does the Soviet thing count as an empire?), and, the best of all, ‘boink let’.

No porn searches though. Except possibly ‘sexs anaxist’, which was used four times. I should write something about Rule 34, I guess. That’ll bring in some very confused hits.

Also, before someone says, “well, duh, he has a model girlfriend!” I’d be more convinced if he posted a photo of her that doesn’t have several hits on Google already. That’s how Michael Lewis thwarted individuals in Liar’s Poker with his knowledge of provenance and art history. Make the alleged plagiarizer re-create the art work with an original piece.

(also, my blog counts outgoing links, and given that I didn’t link directly to the comment and people had to go all the way to that thread and then search through two hundred comments to find it, it’s amazing how many people who read this immediately went to find the picture of the model girlfriend)

Sigh, guess I have to clarify my political identity if people are even googling it. I wouldn’t straight-up call myself a Marxist (LTV, anyone? Although I hear there are some sophisticated modern apologetics for it) – but I’m definitely anti-anti-Marxist; I’m really pissed off about how Marx’s views on society, politics and the motive forces of history are either strawmanned, dismissed out of hand, or, worse, straight-up ignored by today’s mainstream debate. For an example of the latter, just see the liberal reaction to a very straight-up modern retelling of Marx

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism.

Even the fact that such opinions are left-wing orthodoxy appears to be forgotten nowdays. “Entrepreneurs become increasingly dominant over those who own only their own labor”? “…the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption”? Why would a “progressive” publication report on such “news” as if a century and a half of Marxist thought never happened? A vast intellectual tradition has seemingly vanished into thin air.

I might not share all of such once-widespread ideas , but in a world that’s all too ignorant of the most basic Marxian arguments – shocked even to rediscover them – I feel obliged to say a few words in their favour.

If I’d grown up one county over and never gone off to Massachusetts, I’d probably be in the same position. As it is, I’m not surprised; when the strategy shifts from organizing the proletariat because economics to organizing lumpens and intellectuals because society is evil and oppressive and pathological narcissism demands to be fed, of course the Marxian arguments are going to disappear.

(A left-right anti-New-Left coalition would be interesting, but also pretty much impossible, as far as I can tell.)

I’d say that the proletariat got organized pretty good against “lumpens” (the new proletariat) and “intellectuals” (as a deserved comeuppance). By, you know, the other side! It’s like that game-theoretical puzzle where the pirates give up all their loot to the captain and get thrown overboard one by one. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the “decent” proletariat in the western world – but with the way things are heading, automation and all that, the ones who grumble against “entitlements” and “scroungers” today will eventually lumpenize and walk the plank themselves. The gospel of “upward mobility” and the “flexibility” of labour only accelerates the process.

Completely unrelated: it’s very interesting to me that you use the term “very far away” even though the Internet is supposed to be place-irrelevant. In your mental conception of the Internet, are Slate Star Codex and Less Wrong neighbors?
(Sorry, I’m interested in psychogeography and mental maps and and and… sorry.)

A map of a relatively small community (say, the Dark Enlightenment) would make a fascinating cartography project, a la Randall Munroe’s Map of the Internet. I’d do it for my project this semester, but that has to be a quantitative spatial question… sigh…

Andy, I think that is an interesting question also! I wonder what quantitative things on websites (number of links to each other, number of references to each other, etc.) correlate with subjective perception of internet-distance. I figure a lot of it must have to do with group-membership (someone who links to and mentions LW and says “I am a member of this group” will probably be seen as closer to LW than someone who links to and mentions LW just as much but only to say “wow these guys are stupid”). But I’m curious how well this subjective group-membership stuff can be predicted by quantifiable aspects of the websites.

It unfortunately doesn’t run with the cartographic metaphor quite so far, but in case you’re not aware of the thing already.

I was, and it’s probably a more useful diagram, but I was picturing something along the lines of http://xkcd.com/802_large/ . Areas of Dark Enlightenment given their own geographies and coastlines and such. The Plains Of Monarchy? The Peninsula of Masculinity?

The “fifty stalins” thing makes sense. I’m imagining someone reading a comment like this one and wondering what it’s talking about — then finding out.

As for “arguments for rape culture”, if such a thing does exist it makes sense to Chesterton’s Fence it, doesn’t it? A bit premature when we haven’t figured out what exists yet, but if someone thinks they have found the narwhal to rape culture’s unicorn, this would be the next logical step.

Another reason the Fifty Stalins thing makes sense is that it’s one of the more memorable parts of the planet-sized reactionary nutshell post. The talk about cushy professorships and demanding more Stalins was funny and informative (though perphaps my favorite turn of phrase was mentioning that the patriarchy does not literally have a patriarch). I see how someone would just enter in “fifty stalins” to try to find the article they once read.

I haven’t gotten anyone claiming to be attracted to their brother. I don’t know if this is just because the original post used the example of sisters (the exact title was “If Opposites Attract, Why Is My Sister So Pretty?”) or because brothers find sisters attractive but not vice versa.

Going too far into the deep end of Tumblr or Literotica will be illustrative, albeit often in ways that are likely to make you uncomfortable. Intragenerational incest squicks me a lot less than intergenerational, but there’s a /lot/ of both written from the female perspective by authors who take the female gaze. I expect that there’s at least some difference in how the statistical average man and average woman search for porn that may change the effectiveness of Google search methods as a proxy, though.

((Also, as someone at the higher numerical end of the Kinsey scale, the answer is /yes/ to pretty much all variations. I’m pretty sure the male/transmale focused work is pure fantasy rather than wishful thinking related to one’s own specific circumstances, if only by sheer statistics, but there’s even guys asking about how to tempt their brothers, gals asking the same about their sisters, and lots of variants on the above. Not my kink, but some folk do write it well.))

Piggybacking on this most recent post, which doesn’t have too many comments yet: is there anything that would get you to ban a commenter? Anything besides commercial span or links to illegal stuff like ch*ld p*rn?

I just noticed your blog subtitle is ‘Previously an exception to “Don’t read the comment section”‘; wonder when that changed…

There was a rather out of the blue one suggesting Scott was considering child molestation or something to which he contemplated changing the byline, although that was the first time I noticed the byline had changed from the “…secret crushes on a few” one it started with.

me: with the south asian porn queries
I just searched for “anty masive nippals” to see what would happen, as you do
and looked at some pakistani porn

BF: lol

me: there was one mildly surprising thing, which is that the titles of multiple aunty videos described the aunties as “smart”

BF: maybe in the british way.

me: I wondered about that
one video said “hot and smart”
so that doesn’t seem quite right either

BF: hmm

me: my leading hypothesis is that “smart” has a very different connotation in south asian english
but my runner-up is that pakistani porn viewers want to make it with intelligent aunties
which is a charming and idyllic notion

BF: that would be nice.
maybe related to the sexy librarian type thing?

me: who knows
I feel like the amount of information I have now about pakistani porn is probably a local optimum, so I’m not digging

(And yes I can think of a few fairly porn-specific ways to be fashionable without clothes on, but that clearly falls under “more than I want to learn about pakistani porn,” and we wouldn’t be going down this road if anyone but me thought the whole smart aunties thing was funny, so I think I’ll hit the ejector seat on this conversation.)

It might be a misspelling of “smut”. I expect they sound the same in south Asian English, which is based on non-rhotic British English, and which also doesn’t make much distinction between a short “u” and a long “ah” vowel.

Hah. My fondest dream, to be linked in people’s minds with a regulatory agency!

Some follow-ups on data access may be of interest to you – Lunshof, Church, & Prainsack published a Science “policy forum” piece: Raw Personal Data: Providing Access and they had a nice live chat with Lunshof, Prainsack, and John Wilbanks (now on Youtube).

Also, PersonalGenomes.org (which is a 501c3 nonprofit) got funded by the Knight Foundation for our Open Humans Network project.

That’s all on the research end of the data access scale… and DTC might continue in a “research use only”.

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